Market research for under 100 or 400 dollars

Plenty of teams skip testing a concept or a price simply because a study budget does not fit the quarter. That is more an access problem than a method problem : the rigor exists, but its price effectively reserves it for projects already big enough to absorb it.

What a traditional study actually costs

A custom study run by an agency typically costs 15,000 to 50,000 dollars depending on scope. Smaller one-off projects start around 15,000 dollars, and a qualitative multi-market study can climb to 75,000, even 225,000 dollars. A single focus group typically costs 7,000 to 20,000 dollars, recruitment, room, and incentives included. This is not an arbitrary price : it covers a dedicated team, fieldwork organized market by market, and custom-built analysis.

Institutions like Ipsos or Kantar justify that budget level with broad geographic and sector coverage, proprietary panels managed for years, and proven methodology. That is genuine expertise, built for stakes that justify it : a national launch, a portfolio decision, a brand repositioning.

Why the budget rarely balloons for the wrong reasons

Structurally, the heaviest line item is recruiting and managing the human panel : finding the right profiles, compensating them, handling dropouts, redoing fieldwork if the sample does not hold. As long as real people have to be mobilized at scale, that cost does not go away, whichever institute you pick. Platforms like Qualtrics already charge several hundred dollars a month just for the survey distribution tool (a visible plan around $420/month for small teams), before you even bring your own panel.

What changes with a marginal cost per run

Panelia works on a different principle : calibrated synthetic respondents, no human panel to recruit for each run. What is left to pay for is the computation itself, not fieldwork organized for every single test. That is what makes it possible to offer runs at a marginal cost, on the order of a few euros, rather than a five-figure agency retainer.

That does not mean "free" or "unlimited" : the principle stays pay-per-use, scaled to the simulated panel size and the number of runs launched. But the order-of-magnitude gap with a traditional study at 15,000 dollars and up is real, and it changes what a team can afford to test. A pricing hypothesis that would have been judged too minor to justify an agency budget suddenly becomes testable.

What a lower cost should not make you forget

A lower cost makes the method more accessible, it does not replace judgment. Panelia stays a decision-support tool, calibrated on real human data and publicly documented, but not infallible : on a genuinely critical decision, complementary human testing still has its place. The point of a low marginal cost is precisely to test more hypotheses upfront, so that if a human test does happen, it starts from sharper questions.

In practice

The right instinct is not to compare a Panelia run line by line against an agency quote, but to ask what that budget unlocks : the ability to test an idea that would otherwise have stayed a meeting opinion for lack of a dedicated budget. It is a change of scale more than a simple discount.

What this is good for, and what it is not

A low budget mostly opens the door to questions that used to go unasked because nobody wanted to request a five-figure sum for them: a second pricing variant, an alternative headline, a concept that was really just a side idea. For a decision affecting the whole portfolio or a full market launch, a larger effort, real respondents included, still earns its place. Panelia's marginal-cost approach is strongest exactly where a traditional budget is weakest: the many small questions that pile up before the big decision even gets on the table.